r, tears up the warrant
reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of
Love, a joy to live and die for--

'The mistress and mother of pleasure,
The one thing as certain as death'--

yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
immediately.

Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic
affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and
Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of
Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
his wild Maenads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
under their charm; but too many of these poems